


Kintsugi

by CyanideBreathmint



Series: even honey bees [2]
Category: Ghost in the Shell (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Car Porn, Gen, he got better see, my sweet bioroid son, navel gazing extreme sport edition, someone has just been adopted as section 9's team son
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 22:41:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28946076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: What do you do when you wake up after you've died? This is the story of how Proto becomes Section 9's latest field officer.This is a fic in a series meant to bridge the two-year gap between the end of Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2nd Gig, and the Solid State Society movie. This one is also a lot less sad than the last one.
Relationships: Proto & Section 9
Series: even honey bees [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123595
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	Kintsugi

“Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.”  
― China Miéville, _The Scar_

A dull fuzzy hurt crawls and down up his spine and skull like the glowing edge on a smoldering piece of paper, the sensation sharpening with each passing heartbeat. A profound sense of disconnection ripples through his being as he stirs, fretful and uneasy, against the bed he is lying in. His name. He can’t remember his name. Light, low and dim, picks out the edges of things within his range of vision. An IV stand, the railings on his bed, the bulky figure of a man slumped in a chair to his side, his head pillowed on his arms, which are resting on the keyboard of a diagnostic console. The transparent edge of the oxygen mask strapped over his face. His low-light vision fails to come on, despite the relative darkness of his surroundings.

Functions restricted in safe mode. Please end advanced diagnostic program first. This message pops up in the field of his vision, a dull white phosphor glow, and then winks out again.

He tries to sit up, but his body won’t obey him, and he can feel his pulse spiking with the effort. He is starting to panic, and his rising pulse triggers a high-pitched beep from one of the medical devices he’s hooked up to, a monitor of some sort. He thinks he would know what it was, if only he were himself. 

The man beside him stirs and sits up abruptly, putting a warm, dry hand on his left arm. “Lie back down, Proto, it’s okay. It’s okay.” The face comes up in his vision, and he recognizes him. Neatly trimmed mustache, tired, deep-set eyes, small round glasses. Dr. Asuda. And the sound of his name in his ears finally lets him make the connection. His name is Proto. Former tank mechanic and weapons technician for Public Security Section 9, current junior field officer. 

Dr. Asuda begins to tap at the keyboard, the click of the keys soothing, familiar, comforting, and Proto lets his eyes close as he sinks back into the pillow and mattress beneath him. “You gave us quite a scare, you know,” Dr. Asuda says. His voice is hoarse from fatigue, and Proto wants to reassure him, tell him to rest, too, but he can’t muster the energy to. “That attack barrier took out most of the control circuits at the base of your skull, where the ports — well, you know as well as I what they do. Dr. Kanazawa’s had to replace most of that hardware, and we’re looking to see what we can do to make it less of an exploitable weakness in your construction.” 

There’s the sensation of soft fabric pulling lightly around Proto as Dr. Asuda hitches the blanket a little higher, tucking it more securely over him. Proto doesn’t quite have the strength to speak, but he recognizes the diagnostic interface he’s plugged into. That interface was his only means of communication with the world, back when he existed solely as complex lines of self-upgrading code on an advanced neurochip. He thinks effortlessly over the interface plug in the nape of his neck, fancies his thoughts seeping through the cable that joins him to the machine. Imagines the Ghost of his personality following, too, to leave this broken shell behind in this bed of pain.

“I should be dead,” he thinks, as he accesses his last recorded memories, and his thoughts flit like fireflies across the dim screen of the monitor. 

“You were,” Dr. Asuda says. “Major Kusanagi suspected you’d been pulseless for at least twenty to thirty minutes by the time she was summoned to assess your condition, and it took another half hour to stabilize you and bring you here for emergency repairs. Security footage indicates her estimates were probably accurate. You’ve sustained a lot of organ and tissue damage from all that ischemic time. Fortunately there doesn’t seem to be any permanent corruption in your memory.” 

“How long has it been?” Proto asks, again, in text. There’s the sound of water running into a glass, and then the sensation of his oxygen mask being pulled away, a straw being held to his lips. Proto takes a small, cautious sip. The cold water feels good on his dry mouth, and he swallows once, slowly, takes another sip. It’s as though the signals from his mind are travelling to the rest of his body at a delay. A jag of memory intrudes suddenly into his sensorium like a snapshot taken in a lightning storm, the taste of blood, thick down the back of his throat, running down his chin in fat globs. He would shiver if he could. 

Proto turns his head away abruptly from the proffered glass, opens his eyes again to the sight of Dr. Asuda standing over him. It looks like he’s been here every minute of each hour, watching, waiting for Proto to wake. “You’ve been out for 30 hours, give or take. It’s almost early morning here. Are you still thirsty?” 

“No,” Proto manages to say at last. His voice sounds strange in his ears, strained, papery, and the effort hurts in his throat, which provokes a cough that bursts sharp and rusty in his chest.

“Any pain?” Dr. Asuda asks, putting the glass down on the nightstand. 

Proto doesn’t bother speaking aloud again. No, he thinks the sentence into the diagnostic interface, watches Dr. Asuda turn his head to read the words on the screen. “Some. My back. My head.”

Dr. Asuda nods and pulls Proto’s oxygen mask back over his nose and mouth. “I’ll ask if it’s a good idea to increase your dosage of pain medication. Then I want you to rest more. Let the stem cells and micromachines do their work. Set yourself to hibernate mode. We’ll wake you later today, when you’re further along the healing process. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” Proto thinks.

“Good.”

Someone else enters the room shortly after Proto closes his eyes again, their step softer and lighter than Dr. Asuda’s footfalls, and there’s a series of beeps to Proto’s left as someone adjusts the setting on an IV pump. A faint, euphoric glow suffuses him after that, filling his veins with a golden warmth that banishes the gnawing ache in his head, the profound sense of discomfort permeating the rest of his body. It’s easy to let himself drift, then, and he enters hibernate mode, pauses the endless cycles of his mind while he sleeps. 

—

There is early winter sunlight streaming across the room when Proto wakes again, slanting through the windows, leaving bright rectangles stretched across the floor and his bed, and its warmth through the blinds feels immensely good on Proto’s face. His body’s responses feel faster, sharper, less disconnected from his mind, and he accesses his memory effortlessly this time. It is 2 minutes and 37 seconds past 10 AM. His mind has ended hibernate mode after a wakeup signal sent from the diagnostic terminal that he is still plugged into, which prompted the process of waking in his body. Dr. Kanazawa is sitting at the console, looking at him. 

“Good morning, Proto,” Dr. Kanazawa says. 

“Good morning, Dr. Kanazawa.” Speaking hurts less this time, although he has become thirsty again in the time he’s spent unconscious, and a faint sensation of hunger licks at his belly. 

“Do you think you could sit up?” Dr. Kanazawa asks, and Proto nods, his hair rustling against his pillowcase. Dr. Kanazawa presses a button built into the guardrail of Proto’s bed, and the top half of it rises slowly to prop itself up in a gentle incline. Proto has a better view of the room now he’s half-sitting up, and he recognizes it instantly. He’s in Harima, in lab space leased exclusively to Section 9. This is his birthplace. This is where Dr. Asuda first began his work on Proto’s personality, basing him on the codebase the Tachikomas had elaborated upon in the process of gaining sapience. 

This lab is where cyberneticists from Poseidon and tissue sculptors from Locus-Solus had built Proto’s body from scratch under Dr. Kanazawa’s guidance, and this specific room is where he first opened his eyes, began to look out at the world, and learned to inhabit a humanoid-shaped space. According to Proto’s understanding, most humans feel a sense of nostalgia when they visit their birthplaces again, usually one suffused with an appreciation of childhood’s carefree joys. He, lacking a childhood, does not share that sense of nostalgia, and yet he feels oddly comforted to be back here. 

It is the familiarity of the setting, he thinks. A return to when his existence did not involve hacking bare-brained (as it were) into a highly-protected government network and getting mortally wounded by intrusions countermeasures in the process. His memories of the pain, of that office he died in, are less shocking, less intrusive now that he’s able to access everything else in his external memory. Compared to the breadth of his experience, the horror of those hours recedes and gains additional context. This is not to say that the memories are not unpleasant — they still are. His neurochip, however, is not prone to biochemical influence, nor does he experience the long-term neuroarchitecture changes that present themselves in humans under chronic stress. 

All these thoughts remain on low priority in Proto’s consciousness while he listens to Dr. Kanazawa’s instructions and repeats the steps read out to him. He turns his head left and right, slowly, looks up and around, and then follows by lifting both his arms above his lap, rotating and supinating each hand, opening and closing the fingers of each hand into a fist. There’s still a visible tremor running through each movement, a sign that he has not yet regained full control of his body. But this is progress, considering he was not yet well enough to move last night. 

“Much better,” Dr. Kanazawa says. He has taken Proto’s left hand in his latex-gloved hand, and is poking delicately at pressure points in his palm and fingers with a nerve conduction probe, checking the diagnostics readout on the console as he does. “You’re doing much better than you were when you first came in two days ago.” 

“Dr. Asuda says it was bad,” as Dr. Kanazawa begins to test Proto’s right hand. The pressure of the probe tingles from the miniscule amount of electricity passing through Proto’s synthetic flesh at each touch, and his fingers twitch involuntarily with each light jab.

“It was very bad.” Dr. Kanazawa sighs once, a low, grumbling sound. “They’d had you cryobagged for damage control, and Major Kusanagi had to open your skull to bypass the damaged ports in your neck when she tried to get a last-minute memory backup, just in case. Even so, there was enough damage to your biologic processing unit that we were worried that we would have to try to restore you from external memory. You need to take better care of yourself, Proto.”

Proto looks down at the blanket covering his lap. “I’m sorry,” he says, despite his lack of regret. “I had a job to do. It was my duty.”

“I know, I know.” Dr. Kanazawa puts Proto’s hand down, and the nerve conduction probe goes back into an instrument tray, tinkling against the bright steel as it does. “We just can’t help worrying about you. Shiori burst into tears when she saw the state you were in, she was so worried. Don’t tell her I told you this, though, she’ll think I’m going soft in my dotage. Now, Major Kusanagi wanted us to notify her once you were awake. She wants to debrief you. But you should probably try to eat something before that happens. Are you hungry?”

That faint sensation of hunger increases in intensity at the mention of food, and Proto nods in response. “A little, yes,” he says.

—

An android nurse comes in to help Proto to the room’s adjoining bathroom. He manages to stand and walk on his own steam, dragging his wheeled IV infusion pump behind him, even if his steps are slower, less confident than usual. His feet drag and shuffle like those of an old man’s. They’re still infusing more synthetic blood into him, if only because his body’s using most of it up repairing the damage that was done when he stopped breathing for half an hour. 

The shower feels immensely good on his skin. The water is hot, just bearably so, and it rains down on him like a second deluge. His mind, wired to sensors in his skin, brings up the water’s exact temperature, but he banishes that thought to the back of his head, chooses to experience the event without quantifying it. It’s a trick he has to practice to keep doing, due to how pervasive his consciousness is. Unconsciousness itself is an opt-in event for him, even when he sleeps, and he usually only goes into hibernate mode to save power or for very specific diagnostic purposes. 

Last night was the first time he had used it to avoid pain and discomfort. The blank time in his memory is unsettling, he admits to himself, that roughly 40-hour long gap punctuated by last night’s brief conversation with Dr. Asuda. It’s not something he’s used to, not knowing what is happening to him on a conscious level, and he wonders, as the nurse helps him towel his long hair dry, whether humans dread or welcome sleep at the end of the day. He himself would probably feel less ambivalent about unconsciousness if he had the ability to dream.

He’s given a set of pyjamas and a pair of slippers to replace the hospital gown he had been wearing prior, and manages to brush his teeth on his own despite the tremors in his hands. There’s a prickly, itchy sensation inside his head as his dried blood, loosened by the steam he’s been breathing, begins to peel off the inside of his nose and throat. It’s a disgusting process and he rinses his mouth several times to get all the clots out. His blood doesn’t rot like human blood does, fortunately, or his mouth would have tasted like an abattoir floor on a sunny day. After that he’s helped back to bed, and he leans back on his pillows and waits, as the nurse leaves the room. 

Proto expects the nurse to return, but he looks up at the sound of a step at the doorway to find Shiori coming in, a tray in her hands. “Good morning,” she says shyly, and Proto returns the greeting with a nod. The signs of strain and fatigue are evident in her face, and the morning light is unkind to her puffy, dark-circled eyes. Proto does not comment on that. He feels a faint guilt within him, that he has put everyone to this much trouble and worry, but he also isn’t sure if there’s anything that he could have done about it besides not hacking into the network at the Prime Minister’s offices in the first place, and that could never have been an option.

He does his job not because he is hardcoded to, but because Dr. Asuda gave him a strong sense of duty and loyalty, and those personality traits influence every single decision he makes. It’s a stronger, more flexible way of making sure an AI does as ordered, if only because hardcoded obedience is easy to define, but can also be exploited by serving the letter of the law, if not its intent. It’s what separates Proto from his android cousins — he has duties instead of imperatives, preferences instead of yes/no binaries. He is sophisticated enough to understand the meaning of “maybe”, like his lost friends, the Tachikomas.

“I’m sorry to have worried you so much,” he says at last, as Shiori puts the tray down on the roll-out table in his room, and then wheels it over his bed. Breakfast is okayu, a light, digestible rice porridge. This bowl is topped with slivers of green onion and flakes of salted, grilled salmon, and its golden hue speaks to the raw egg that had been beaten into it while it was still steaming hot. 

There’s also a small dish of simmered pumpkin, and a glass of yuzucha — fragrant yuzu zest and honey stirred into hot water. This is all very much the kind of thing you’d feed a convalescent. Which he supposes he is, at this point. It’s not as though he gets sick, so this is his first experience with illness and recovery.

“No, it’s okay,” Shiori says, and Proto glances up at her, at her soft, round face. This is the first time, he also realizes, that he has seen her without her mask on. She had not worked onsite at Harima during his construction, and he has known her solely through the fortnightly maintenance sessions he undergoes to keep his functions in good order. 

“It’s nice to know what you look like, after all this time,” Proto says. He picks up his spoon, frowns slightly at the way it trembles, and tries for a shallow scoop of porridge, manages to bring it to his mouth without spilling its contents. The soft rice is gentle on his sore throat, and it warms him internally all the way down. Shiori reaches up as though to help him, but he lifts a hand to wave her off.

“Oh, right,” Shiori says after a few awkward moments of silence, as Proto continues to eat his breakfast very slowly, “you haven’t ever seen me without a surgical mask on.”

“No, I haven’t. Although I didn’t think it took a doctoral research fellow to bring me my breakfast.” This is not part of his earliest memories of Harima. They had fed him largely homogenous meal bars then, at least until he had learned how to control his body well enough to use utensils such as chopsticks, and then it was convenience store bentos until he moved into his own apartment and discovered other things to eat.

“No. I wanted to do it, really. I couldn’t make you eat Dr. Kanazawa’s cooking after you nearly died.” she says, and this is when Proto belatedly puts two and two together. Shiori cooked this breakfast herself, in the lab’s tiny staff kitchen/breakroom. The gesture touches him greatly, and he nearly drops the spoon in the bowl. “It’s funny you bring it up, though,” Shiori says, pretending not to notice his gaffe, “that this is the first time you’ve seen my face, because I knew what you were going to look like before I even met you.”

“Oh?” 

Shiori smiles, looking downwards at her clasped hands in her lap. “Dr. Kanazawa’s a brilliant engineer, he’s really creative in that scope, but he kind of has tunnel vision outside of it. When we were working with the people from Locus-Solus, they asked him what he wanted you to look like. He didn’t want them to interrupt his work on your nervous system so he came to me and said, ‘Hey, Shiori, you like guys, so you know what a handsome guy looks like. You choose.’” 

This is all news to Proto, and yet he can see perfectly well, in his mind’s eye, how it occurred. Dr. Kanazawa’s brilliance is indeed prone to bouts of hyperfocus. “That’s how it happened, I see.”

Shori’s gaze grows a little distant, her pupils focusing less on what she’s seeing, as she delves into memory. “I had a good friend in middle school, we were best friends then. And her older brother was a couple years older than us, he’d started high school. He would bring her to school every morning on the back of his bicycle. I guess you could say he was my first crush. He was who I thought about when I talked to the tissue sculptors on Dr. Kanazawa’s behalf. Not that you look identical to him, though. I’m smart enough to know why that’s a bad idea. So I had Locus-Solus throw a couple famous actors into the mix.”

It would take Proto very little effort to look into Shiori’s background and trace her acquaintances, find images of his almost-doppelganger in cyberspace, but he resists the urge. It would be an unforgivable breach of her privacy, and curiosity is not a valid reason for doing so. “I see,” he says instead. “What happened to him?” 

“I don’t know,” Shiori says with a sad little shake of her head. “They moved away when I was 16, and we lost contact. There went my teenage dreams. Although it’s all for the best. I don’t know if I’d have gone into postgrad if he’d still been around. I could have married him and it’d have been babies ever after, and just between you and me, you’re the only son I want to be responsible for right now.”

The absurdity of that last thought brings a smile to Shiori’s face, and Proto recognizes that look. She says “son”, but he can read the microexpressions in her gaze, in the movements of her mouth, to know that her infatuation lives on at least a little, just directed his way now. It surprises him that it’s taken so long for the truth to emerge, but then she’s never been bare-faced before him prior to this morning, and there’s a lot of nuance one can miss that way. 

And, he also thinks, she’s probably professional enough to never let it get further than a pipe dream. That’s what he would do if their situations were reversed. “Thank you very much for breakfast, Shiori,” Proto says, as he puts his spoon down in the empty bowl. “And for taking care of me.”

Shiori gives him a little pat on the hand, her touch brisk, light. “It’s what I signed up for when I said I was willing to work on a classified government project.” She rises from the chair beside Proto’s bed, and picks up the tray with its empty dishes, leaving the half-full glass of yuzucha behind in case he should still want it. “Shall I message Major Kusanagi now, and tell her you’re ready for your debriefing?”

“Yes, please,” he says. “Thank you.” 

—

Major Motoko Kusanagi enters the room with her usual poise and deceptively light step. She’s dressed no differently than usual, in her black winter uniform and leather biker jacket, and she stands out against the white-tiled floor and sunlit walls like a living shadow. Proto waits in silence as the Major takes the chair beside his bed — he has never felt the need to fill the air with small talk when he’s speaking to her. She knows who and what he is, and there is no need for him to pretend he’s someone he’s not around her. “Good,” she says, after a long, searching look at him. “They put your scalp back on the right way around. I messed your pretty hair up quite a bit when I had to get into that titanium skull of yours to take a backup.” That hard, bleak humor is a relief to hear after all the worry and solicitousness directed his way. 

“You’re one to talk, Major,” Proto says, keeping his face and voice perfectly mild and neutral, “looking like you chose your hair color from a box of child’s crayons.” This is rather more daring than he normally would be to a superior officer, but then he can’t imagine the Major going to the significant trouble of saving his life to then shoot him in the face for his lip. In truth Proto has always found her and her purple hair quite beautiful, in the way a human finds mountains beautiful, without any sense of attraction at all. 

“Good,” the Major says again, this time without the facetious edge to her voice. “You really are feeling better. You must know by now I’m here to debrief you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Proto says, still entirely too straight-faced. He appreciates his control over his emotional expressions because it allows him to play with humor in the dry, droll way that pleases his intellect the most. But he also appreciates the fact that the Major cares about his well being, and the way she tests him with verbal sparring. It helps him sharpen his sense of wit.

“I’m going to keep this informal,” the Major says, all business now, “so talk to me. Tell me what happened with the Prime Minister that morning.”

“Chief Aramaki promoted me to field officer almost seven weeks ago, but he did not activate my status formally until —” Proto takes a nanosecond to calculate the hours, accounting for the time he spent unconscious “— four days ago. That morning I was to accompany him, with Mr. Togusa, to an emergency meeting with the Prime Minister so he could secure authorization for Section 9 to apprehend Hideo Kuze in Dejima.”

“And he asked you to go armed, in anticipation of trouble,” the Major says.

Proto nods in confirmation. “He did, yes. My firearm was confiscated when we were taken into custody under suspicion of treason, as was Mr. Togusa’s.” 

“Yes, I’m aware of that. Togusa tells me you were the one who heard the Prime Minister being charged with treason, before her arrest.”

“Yes.”

“May I access that memory for our records?” She doesn’t have to ask, but she does, which is something Proto thinks about constantly, in various tiny ways. He isn’t human, and would count as equipment without the polite fiction of his legal identity (required to hold a job and rent a home and open a bank account), but everyone treats him as though he is, because of how he looks. And there are other people, full humans, who are treated as subhuman regularly because of their lack of societal privilege. The poor. Homeless. Refugees. 

“You have my consent.” Proto tips his head obediently to the side as Kusanagi pulls an interface cable from a built-in reel at the nape of her neck, and a faint frisson passes through them both as she pushes his cornsilk hair aside, and plugs the cable into the freshly-replaced port at the back of his neck. It’s a different sensation, being connected to a person instead of a diagnostic terminal. There’s an ephemeral, phantom scent in his head, the unique milky smell of her pale synthetic skin mingled with the perfumes in her soap and shampoo that fades almost as swiftly as it appears, and then there’s her mind, hard and bright as diamond against his. Proto closes his eyes and drops his barriers for her, and he senses the passing of her Ghost in his thoughts as she accesses his memory of those vital minutes.

_Proto is standing before the door again, the stacked heels of his new dress shoes sinking into thick green carpet as he waits politely for Prime Minister Kayabuki to return from yet another crash meeting, and his thoughts are beginning to wander. He has been standing there for hours — his synthetic body does not tire as easily as an organic one, but the maze barriers installed in the government building makes accessing cyberspace difficult, and therefore his problem is one more of mental boredom than physical fatigue._

_A snatch of conversation comes through the door, and his acute hearing manages to pick the syllables apart and configure them into intelligible speech._

_“— You are therefore to be taken into custody until this situation is resolved. Please step out of the vehicle.”_

_“Chief!” Proto calls out to Togusa and to Aramaki, who are both seated as they wait, and they rise swiftly at his alarm._

_“I demand to know who authorized this.” Kayabuki says, her voice almost rising to a shout, as the door slides open to reveal the scene. She is physically trembling with indignation as she faces off with an internal security agent._

_“What’s the meaning of this?” Chief Aramaki draws himself up to his unimpressive full height, but Proto is at his right hand to support him, with Togusa at his left._

The Major accesses another section of Proto’s memory, and he feels, for a strange, unreal moment, as though he is watching himself over her shoulder.

_He is propped up against the back of a desk, fresh blood coagulating on his lapels and shirt front, down the length of his necktie. The Chief grunts with effort as he drags an unconscious and incapacitated security agent into the unused office._

_“Proto,” he says, “can you lock the door?”_

_Proto swallows a mouthful of blood before he speaks. “Yes.” The door slides shut as he trips its electronic switch mentally. “I’m very sorry to put you to all this trouble.” The pain in his head is a rising throb that speaks of severe damage. He tries to turn his pain sensors off again, but all he gets are error messages._

_“It’s all right,” the Chief says, reassuring, fatherly. “There are more important issues now. Have you gotten any updates from the Tachikomas?”_

_Proto retreats momentarily from his body to confer in the cyberspace forum he shares with the Tachikomas, and flits regretfully back to report. “Yes. There’s no activity so far from the nuclear sub. Also, it looks like the century plane over Dejima has crashed.”_

_“You mean the refugees shot it down?”_

It’s almost as though Proto is a physical book, his consciousness the pages the Major is leafing delicately through, her touch deft and careful. 

_The Prime Minister stands over Proto, her gaze dark, intent. “Can you patch my hotline to the American Empire into this room?” she asks him. “I’ll try requesting that they cancel the nuclear strike.”_

_Proto hears the Chief speak as he turns again to the painless incorporeality of cyberspace. “Please do it. It all hinges on whether or not they’re aware of what’s going on.”_

And another memory plays itself out before their eyes, but that is also a misnomer. Neither of them are using any optical organs, only the visual parts of their memories and cognition.

_Mr. Togusa is kneeling in front of Proto, his hands on Proto’s shoulders, steadying him. “Can you hold out for a little more?” he asks, concerned._

_“I will do my best,” Proto says, despite his growing pain and distress. It is a good thing that he has never been very emotive, or the lie would be more obvious. But Togusa believes him, which is good. He needs to be able to focus on what comes next, without distraction._

_Togusa rises to his feet. “We have to stop Gouda, but I’ll come back for you. So just hang in there.”_

_“Lock the door behind us after we leave, for your safety,” The Chief says. Proto isn’t sure if the Chief believes his lie, but he also knows that Chief Aramaki will do what is necessary._

_“Yes, sir.”_

_They leave, their steps swift and purposeful, and Proto shuts the door behind them with an effort of mind, trips its locks again. He knows at this point that he will not see them again. He knows he is dying._

The Major withdraws herself from Proto’s mind after she reviews and copies the relevant sections of his memory to an external storage unit, and he opens his eyes again after she pulls the interface plug free of his jack. “Thank you,” she says as she reels the cable back into its housing. He wonders if this is an intimacy most humans understand or appreciate, to have someone’s mind in contact with theirs, and decides not. The dominant perspective of a human’s life is still a corporeal one, cyberized or not. They are for the most part chained to their sensory perceptions, and everything in their experience is filtered through it. 

“How would you assess your own performance, while you served at the Chief’s side?” the Major asks, after she puts the storage unit away. Proto is fairly sure at this point that she has already made an assessment of his performance from the memories she has accessed and copied. This question is more of a psychological one than a procedural one.

Proto has already organized his thoughts on the matter, but he pauses to provide the right conversational timing. “There are things that I could have anticipated better,” he says. “For example, the attack barrier that incapacitated me.” He does not state the obvious — that most of his equipment had been confiscated along with his sidearm, and he had therefore been forced to hack into high-security networks without so much as a dummy barrier. “But I persevered despite my injuries, within the limits of my ability. I believe my performance can be improved with more experience, but the only way to get relevant experience in the field.” 

The Major nods. “From where I stand, I think they made one major mistake, where it comes to you.”

“They made two mistakes,” Proto says, correcting her after a minute of silence. It’s not that he doesn’t have anything to say, but he just wants to take a moment to bask in the achievement. The Major raises an eyebrow, silently beckoning for the rest of his statement.

“They disarmed me,” he continues, “but they left me my multi-tool. It’s deadlier than a gun, in the right hands.” 

The Major smiles in acknowledgement of his technical skills. “In your hands, you mean. And?”

Proto allows himself a slight smile now, an uncharacteristic little display of pride. “And they assumed I was harmless once disarmed. Information is power.”

The look in the Major’s red-pupiled eyes is one of recognition, acknowledgement. It’s clear to Proto that she has held similar thoughts about herself for quite some time now, which is probably why she continues to use this female-presenting cyborg body. People in a patriarchal society will consistently underestimate women and the capabilities thereof. That assumption can be weaponized against the ignorant. “For the record,” she says, “Chief Aramaki was very impressed by your performance, and so am I, after going through your memories. If Section 9 were a more public sort of agency we’d have to write up a commendation of some sort, but let’s be frank, what good is a commendation that only maybe a dozen people will see? Our sincere thanks will have to do instead. On a more practical level, I’m going to recommend to Chief Aramaki that he make your temporary activation as a field officer permanent.”

“Understood, Major,” says Proto. This is at once something he expected, and something he did not. He had estimated his chances of permanent promotion at roughly 50%, depending on whether or not Major Kusanagi wanted to give him a place on her combat team. There are reasons both for and against it, for all that he is almost as fast, tough, and strong as fully cyberized members of the team such as herself and Batou. 

“This of course comes with a commensurate increase in employee rank, which means increased salary, expenses stipend, the usual” the Major says. “You probably have the relevant regulations copied to your memory, so I won’t need to go over everything in detail.”

“I do,” he confirms.

“So now comes the personal stuff,” the Major says, and with this her body language changes subtly, as she lets her shoulders sink a little, tilts her head to denote a drop in formality. “How are you doing, really? It can’t be easy to have died.”

Proto returns her honesty with some of his own, letting the slight distress he feels at the recollection surface to furrow his brow. “It was not enjoyable,” he says in an abuse of understatement. “But it is just one memory among many others, and the only certainty about this life that we have is that we must all die, someday. It is an acceptable price for the gift of sapience.” 

The Major nods. “You know you’ll be risking your life many times over as a field officer of Section 9,” she says. 

This is something Proto has had the time to get used to, since the day Chief Aramaki summoned him to his office and informed him about his impending activation as a field officer. He searches his mind and finds himself still willing to proceed, despite his recent death experience. “So do you.”

“It’s a risk we take,” the Major says with a shrug.

“Yes,” Proto agrees. “What I’m really having trouble with is — is knowing that the Tachikomas are gone.” He has found himself reflexively connecting to their shared forum several times now, only to find it empty each time, a sensation that he thinks is roughly analogous to a human feeling about in their mouth with their tongue for a missing tooth, and finding bloody gum each time. 

“They are, Proto. I’m sorry.” Major Kusanagi sounds genuinely saddened, despite her own muted expression. It’s something in her voice, a slight flatness in her enunciation that gives it away, and Proto feels a sudden urge to comfort her, despite the fact that he’s the one who has died a ghastly, painful death less than two days ago.

“They knew the price they were going to pay, Major, as did I, and were willing to pay it, as was I,” Proto says, hastily articulating his thoughts. “But I will miss them. The promotion makes it easier, however. The change in duties will be a distraction.” And I won’t have to visit an empty hangar every day, wishing they were still there, he does not say. 

“That hangar won’t be empty for that much longer, though,” the Major says, as though reading his thoughts. Although she is not literally reading them, as they are not connected right now. No, she just happens to know the patterns of his cognition extremely well. “We have Kenbishi contracted to produce an updated walker tank design. The Uchikoma.”

“No,” Proto says with a tiny nod, acquiescing to the truth, “but it won’t be the same.” 

“Somehow, I doubt so, too.” The Major rises from her chair without any further ado and gathers up the external storage unit, shoves it into a pocket of her jacket. This conversation is over. 

Before she can leave, though, Proto speaks again, this time on a private, encrypted comms channel, so they can’t be overheard. “Before you go, Major. How is Dr. Asuda’s prosecution proceeding? I know he’s here at Harima now, but I thought he was going to be sent to prison for his attempt at defection.”

“Proceedings have been halted, as part of an under-the-table deal,” she silently says. “He submits to house arrest for two years, wears an ankle monitor, and makes sure you don’t die.”

“You called him back here to help save me, and used that as an excuse to lighten his sentence,” he thinks at her. It is not a question, but rather a statement. 

Major Kusanagi is almost to the door of Proto’s sickroom, before she speaks again. “I did,” she says aloud, pausing at the doorway to glance at him one last time.

“Thank you, Major Kusanagi,” Proto says, responding aloud in kind.

“You’re welcome.” The door shuts behind her, and she leaves, and Proto is left to himself for a time. It is only later that he realizes she has been hiding a great loss behind professionalism and jocularity, and the lingering impression of her sorrow remains in his sense of self for some time after.

—

Proto is lying still in his hospital bed, letting his body rest while his active mind retreats to cyberspace and occupies itself there, when someone else enters his room. The attenuated winter sun is beginning its descent towards the horizon, and the sky is turning a heavy gray. Proto props himself up on one elbow, and then sits comfortably up with a vague sense of surprise at how easy the process is, to see Dr. Asuda sitting down beside him, in the chair beside his bed, before the diagnostic console.

“Good afternoon, Proto,” Dr. Asuda says. He looks as though he has slept and showered recently, which is good. 

“Good afternoon, Dr. Asuda,” Proto says, waiting for Dr. Asuda to plug him in for another diagnostic session, but he does not.

“You’re looking a lot better now,” Dr. Asuda says instead, “than you did last night. Feeling it too, no doubt.” 

“I am, yes,” Proto says. He brings his hands up, closes them swiftly into fists. The tremors are gone, which means he’s probably finished regenerating. He brings up his internal diagnostics with a thought, and confirms the guess. He’ll just need another infusion of stem cells and micromachines then, since he’s used most of his reserves up putting himself back together. “Thank you. Both for saving my life, and for staying by my side.” 

Dr. Asuda nods, turning in his chair to face Proto, and his face twitches as he searches for the right words. For a moment, Proto wonders if he has said something wrong, but it soon becomes obvious that Dr. Asuda is in the grip of strong emotion. His hands tighten on the armrests of the chair he is sitting in, and he lets out a low sigh as he collects his thoughts. “How could I not? You know, Proto, I’ve never really been the family type. Or the romantic type, even. My work is all I have, and … that’s fine, most of the time. It’s all I really want to do. But for a while, as I saw myself aging, I wondered about the posterity of my work, given my situation.”

It makes logical sense. “I’m your legacy, therefore you care about me.”

“No,” Dr. Asuda says, heartfelt, a little horrified, and Proto realizes that he was mistaken. “I care about you, but not just because you could be my legacy. You are the start of something that will become very special, yes, but it would be unfair to expect you to _carry_ my legacy. You have your own choices to make, and your own life to live. No. You’re my legacy, because you’re the closest thing I’ll ever have to a son of my flesh.”

A strange heat and tightness wells up in Proto’s chest as he understands what Dr. Asuda is saying, and the great kindness that everyone has shown him suddenly makes sense. He has never been an Other to them, despite his synthetic origins. “That’s why you named me, when you created me.”

“Yes, Hajime. That’s why I gave you a proper name in our first conversation,” Proto remembers that first conversation too, his first words blinking onto the monitor. _Hello, world._ He smiles at the memory, and Dr. Asuda smiles, too. “For a while, I lost sight of why you were important to me, and I tried to find greatness elsewhere. But I’ve been given a second chance, and now I realize, it doesn’t matter whether anyone knows I was your creator. You’re alive, and that’s what matters.” 

Proto reaches out for Dr. Asuda’s hand, and feels his own fingers enveloped in a tight, almost painful grip. “You must be ambivalent about my promotion to field officer, then,” he says.

“Well, I’m going to worry, as any father might. But what kind of father cages his son to keep him safe?” Dr. Asuda’s gaze is unfocused, his thoughts directed inward at old memories. Painful ones, from the tremor in his hand. “Not a very good one, I think. I’m never going to stop worrying about you. But I think if you were going to work in a dangerous profession, then it’d be best if you worked alongside the best, and that is what Section 9 are, yes?” Dr. Asuda gives Proto’s hand a last, hard squeeze, and then lets him go. 

Proto blinks, feeling tears run down his cheeks for the second time in his brief life. “Yes. Thank you, Father. If I may call you that.”

“Always, Hajime, my son.” Dr. Asuda excuses himself shortly afterwards, claiming to have forgotten something on the way in, but Proto knows exactly why he is leaving the room, and does not ask. 

—

Dr. Kanazawa finally lets Proto out of the lab the next day, after a final diagnostic pass, and to his surprise it’s Togusa who has come to pick him up. It seems that it would be more convenient to just dispatch an Operator to pick him up, instead of sending on-call staff. 

“Hey, Proto.” Togusa hands Proto an overnight bag without explanation, and Proto unzips it, to find a change of clothes and a pair of shoes tucked inside it. 

“Sir,” Proto says, “thank you for coming.” The clothes and shoes are his own, which means someone probably stopped by his apartment to collect them. That’s slightly embarrassing to think about. He hasn’t dusted lately. 

Togusa winces at that. “You need to stop calling me that, Proto. You’re officially part of the team now.” 

“As you wish.” Proto’s sidearm lies on top of the neatly folded clothing, in its holster. His personal effects sit in a clear plastic bag beside it — his badge and ID, wallet, keys. The multitool that saved the Prime Minister’s life and career. Proto leaves his bed and heads to the bathroom to change without further comment. It’s not as though changing out in the open would bother him, given his lack of nudity taboo, but he knows it might bother Togusa, who is in some ways the most technologically naive member of Section 9. 

“Say, Proto,” Togusa says, while Proto is buttoning his shirt up. His voice comes attenuated through the bathroom door, but he’s intelligible enough.

“Yes?” Proto decides not to roll his sleeves up after a quick glance at the weather report. It’s about 10 degrees Celscius out there, pleasantly cool. 

There is no answer for a few moments, long enough for Proto to have pulled his khakis up, and he knows that Togusa is hovering around on the verge of saying something, so he waits. “I’m sorry we left you,” the reply comes at last, “back there, in that office. I —” 

“Don’t blame yourself,” Proto says as he feeds his belt through the loops on his waistband. “You had a job to do.”

“Yeah, that’s what I tell myself,” Togusa says, “but it doesn’t make the memory of finding you afterwards any easier to think about. There were medics there, but they didn’t have any idea what to do with you, I almost went mad trying to figure out what to do until the Major showed up.” 

That triggers a pang of guilt, and Proto hesitates just as he picks up his shoulder rig. “I’m sorry,” he says.

There is a rude, brief thump on the bathroom door. “Hey, none of that. You’re the one who died, so I should actually be apologizing.”

They’re going to keep apologizing to each other all day, Proto thinks, if he doesn’t nip this in the bud right now. “Well, it can’t possibly be your fault that you know nothing about a heretofore classified Section 9 project to engineer a synthetic intelligence that might be a better candidate for fieldwork than the Operators. You might have had the clearance level, but it wasn’t as though you needed to know until recently.”

That, at least, gets a chuckle out of Togusa. “This is going to take getting used to,” he says, just as Proto opens the door and emerges from the bathroom, dressed and shod. He leaves the empty overnight bag on the hospital bed while he shakes out his navy blue rain jacket, then sticks an arm into a sleeve. 

“What is?” Proto asks. The waterproof fabric rustles slickly as he tugs it on.

Togusa snorts, sticking his hands in his coat pockets. “It looks like they upgraded your sass level when they fixed you up. You might actually be better at passive-aggressive regulation quoting than Ishikawa is now, and he’s a master of the art.”

Proto smiles at that as he zips his rain jacket halfway up, mindful of the room he’ll need to be able to draw his sidearm. Not that he anticipates having to right now, but it’s a good habit to establish now that he’s a field officer. “Well, there are things I have to get used to, too.”

“Such as?” Togusa asks, taking the bait. Excellent.

“Such as not calling you ‘Sir’.”

Togusa groans aloud, too distracted to feel any guilt. Just as planned. “Please stop that, Proto, it makes me feel old.”

“Yes, sir,” Proto wants to say, but he does not. His things go in his pockets — the wallet and badge, his keys, and he lingers for a moment over the multitool, letting his fingertips explore its texture, before it, too, gets put away for future use. 

The real reason for Togusa’s journey to Harima does not become apparent until they both exit the lab into the parking lot. Parked outside is a late-model Mazda RX-8 painted a pale, ghostly silver-gray, and Proto blinks in surprise when Togusa tosses the keys to him. “You’re going to need a work vehicle now, and the Bossman found this, and I quote, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in Niihama PD impound, where she’d been sitting for a few years. Ishikawa gave her a new fictitious owner history, and the guys you used to work with tuned her up and gave her a new paint job while you were laid up.”

“I —”Proto is at a temporary loss for words. The “Bossman” that Togusa is referring to is Batou, who has exquisite taste in cars. Proto has admired his vintage Lancia Stratos for almost his entire life, certainly his entire career at Section 9, starting his first day at work, when he happened to spot the Stratos parked in the garage. 

This is an incredibly thoughtful choice, Proto realizes, as he walks around to the driver’s side of the car. RX-8s are quirky and fun to drive, fast and nimble enough to hold up to the demands of the job. They’re also fairly unique, running on Mazda’s Wankel rotary engine, and that alone promises hours of entertainment trying to maximize its performance in his off-hours. This car is in wonderful condition for something that was produced in the early 2010s.

“Don’t look so surprised,” Togusa says, as he climbs in the passenger seat and waits while Proto looks around and adjusts the driver’s seat and rear view mirror. “You’re gonna catch a fly in that open mouth. She’s still a work car, so you’re going to have to turn her in if you ever quit.”

Proto lets out a small huff of amusement at that. As though anyone ever resigns from working at Section 9. As though he ever has the option of simply quitting. But that doesn’t seem like that bad a thing, not right now, as he takes hold of the car’s gear stick. It’s a manual. Good. 

“Whaddaya say to taking her out for a test drive?” Togusa asks, as he fastens his seat belt. “As long as you account for dropping me off with the wife and kids in your itinerary, that is.”

Proto turns the key in the ignition and listens to the low, satisfying rumble of her engine. “Yes,” he says, as it warms up under his hands, the vibrations from the engine thrumming quietly through the steering wheel, communicating the car’s heartbeat to him. “That sounds like a great idea.”

“Yeah, well, you’re also gonna need this before we go.” Togusa reaches into a coat pocket and pulls out a small, flat piece of plastic. Proto glances at it, and smiles. It’s a brand new driver’s license, issued to his legal identity. Freshly cooked up by Ishikawa, no doubt, so Proto will have something to show the cops if he gets pulled over testing the RX-8 out. 

“Thank you, but I don’t think so,” Proto says, as he slips the license into his wallet, and then pockets it. 

Togusa shakes his head in mock disapproval. “Gonna take it slow, like any law-abiding citizen?”

“No,” Proto says, putting the car in reverse as he pulls out of the lot, to execute a flawless three-point turn. “I don’t think they’ll be able to catch us.” He floors the accelerator, and the Mazda growls, and then roars as they tear down the road, leaving fat black tire marks behind them on the way out of Harima.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, realistically I assume Proto tripped at least 3 or 4 speed traps on the way back to Niihama, but I also assume he hacked into the police database and made the citations go away.


End file.
